


Sea-Change

by plurality



Category: Dishonored
Genre: Fairy Tales, Gen, Whales, Whaling and all of that bloody work associated with it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-02
Updated: 2016-06-02
Packaged: 2018-07-11 18:17:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7064887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plurality/pseuds/plurality
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daud remembers a story from his youth. The Outsider helpfully adds to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sea-Change

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rabionesque](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabionesque/gifts).



> A very belated gift to the wonderful rabionesque!

The clearest memory Daud has of his mother is her voice, dropping into that familiar cadence, as she mixed her herbs. She had him sitting on a stool across from her, so that he heard her voice through the haze above the pot. He thinks of the story now, as he drifts off to sleep. In a few days, he will lead the attack on Empress Kaldwin, and all he can think about is how much he can remember of his mother’s tale. It went something like this, surely:

> It was a hunting voyage out into the middle of the whales’ breeding grounds. The captain of the ship remembered the barrels of oil and meat he was contracted to carry home, the emptiness in the cargo hold, the woman who waited for him back on land. He looked at the whales and their calves, and said, “How long will we have to sail if we hunt only the bulls. Let us spear the females and their calves as well – the sea can spare them, for they are many and large, and we so small.”
> 
> The sailors under his command nodded to each other. “The captain speaks true, we long for our families back home. Let us hunt them all – as much as we can carry.”
> 
> So they did, until even the deck of the ship stank of gore and blood, no matter how many times it was scrubbed. The ship grew heavy and swollen with barrels of oil and whale meat, and the sailors cheered at the thought of a warm hearth waiting for them at port.
> 
> But the sea lashed. The sea roiled. The sea drank in the blood and the death knells of its beasts, and seethed its red foam at the hull of the whaling ship. The sea coalesced a plan, and simmered with anticipation.
> 
> The sailors soon spoke of a mother and her calf, both larger than anything they had ever seen. The two of them alone could fill the ship to its brim, send them all home. Come, Captain, let us hunt for this pair, at once!
> 
> And so the Captain, eager to return to his lover, agreed. He would lead the hunt himself, as he had always done, and spear either one of them with his harpoon. They would be renown when they return – faster and more bountiful than any other whaling ship.
> 
> They set out the next morning, Captain at the help, and sailors rowing with a fervor they had not felt before. The whales parted at the sight of their row boat, diving deep and safe, but a pair remained, swimming carelessly in the breeding ground’s rich waters, mother and calf all white and gleaming like offerings.
> 
> “Look, lads,” the Captain said to his crew, “the sea itself wishes for us to return home!”
> 
> He aimed the harpoon sharp and true, and it pierced the calf’s back like a knife to meat. It wailed and thrashed, and its mother circled it round and round. Rope tied to the harpoon’s shaft ran hot against the sailors’ hands as the calf struggled and swam. Slowly but surely, the sailors hauled it close, pierced it with their own harpoons until it lay limp even as its mother moaned, just out of prodding distance.
> 
> They celebrated deep into the night, with the calf’s body held aloft by well used cranes and drained of blood. The Captain himself climbed atop its carcass, ready to take the first scoop of oil from a wound by its blowhole, as he had started doing ever since he was a boy.
> 
> But as he reached in, the calf’s flesh clenched around his arm, and in the effort to release himself from its grip, the Captain fell into its hollowed body. As he tried to climb out, his hands sank into the wet innards, his legs became stuck to the soft floor. Oil dripped into his eyes, and he blinked. Once. Twice. And he saw with new eyes out onto the deck.
> 
> The wounds he and his sailors had inflicted on it closed without a trace, and dangling from the meat hooks, the whale calf – he – inhaled once more. Or perhaps he had never stopped.
> 
> He tried to move his arms, and bleeding flippers responded. He wriggled his legs, and a single tail twitched. He tried to cry out, and a pained clicking echoed out into the air. He breathed and thrashed, and the worn cranes broke. He fell through the ship, his weight plummeting him through the deck, through the hold, through the hull, and he fell into the fury of the sea.
> 
> The Captain heard his sailors’ cries, soon muffled by water, by sharks drawn to the bloody waters. He saw barrels of oil and planks of wood bob away from him. And crashing through the remains of his proud ship – the mother whale, scarred skin a powdery white and with dark, depthless eyes.

 “It is interesting that you do not tell the whole story,” the Outsider says, hanging in the Void. “But then again, it is so predictable. People always do seem to miss out on the entire picture.”

Daud bristles. “Maybe it’s because not everyone can be a god and look all at once.”

“Your mother would have told you the rest of it, you know. But the Abbey got its fingers into the land, and strangled her words before she could speak it. She might have told you, had you not been taken. Possibilities.”

A black eye peers at him. The Outsider’s smile turns sharp. “Would you like me to tell you, as she might have, in another life?”

Daud doesn't answer. But then, when did that ever stop him?

> The mother whale took the Captain as her own child, and herded him away from the wreckage, away from the life he once had. He struggled – oh yes, he struggled – but he was too small against her bulk.
> 
> “I will drown myself,” he threatened, and the mother scoffed.
> 
> “I will dive beneath you and push you to the surface. Then, you must breathe,” she replied.
> 
> “I will swim away! Far and far away so I will be free find a way to reverse this witchcraft,” the Captain said, and knew he was outmatched.
> 
> “You know the seas from above. But I know the seas from beneath. I will ride the currents, fish and birds will tell me where you are.”
> 
> “I will throw myself upon the harpoons of whalers at the first chance I get.”
> 
> “And I will not let you out of my sight. We will travel far away from any ship. You will not find peace in strangers.”
> 
> The Captain tried to swim away, but found that his young body could only go so far until he had to stop. He hung exhausted and limp, until the mother whale nudged him to breach, to breathe.
> 
> “Why keep me alive, then?” He had to ask.
> 
> And the mother looked at him, this intruder, murderer, wearing the skin of her calf as his own. “You will live, and you will grow,” she said. “You will grow to be as big as I, perhaps bigger, until this conversation fades – and one day, you will happen upon a whaling ship. You will recognize them as some of your pod – they who had survived the sinking and thirst for vengeance. You will go to them, hoping that they would recognize you, and they will kill you. They will strip you of your oil, your meat. And they will toss your bones into the sea, where they will sink deep into the dark.”

When Daud wakes up, shaking and shivering in his bed, the Void lingers in the corners of his eyes. The Outsider’s voice hums at him like a memory, the sound not unlike a whalesong, as he says the final line. “Then, you will be, _forever_ , mine.”  

**Author's Note:**

> This tale is cobbled together from Artemis and the Hunter, Moby Dick, and the Runaway Bunny.


End file.
